The WDN Symbian DevZone Looks at The Sony Ericsson P800

by Richard Bloor, January 13, 2003

Launched to a limited number of markets before Christmas and due for worldwide availability early this year the Sony Ericsson P800 has been much anticipated. With the help of Ulf Wretling, Director for Sony Ericsson's Developer Program, Richard looks at the development of the P800 and what this phone has to offer.


The Sony Ericsson P800 is probably the most anticipated phone based on the Symbian OS because it takes Symbian head to head with existing PDAs and smartphone products from both Palm and Microsoft. However the P800 is much more phone like the products based on these other operating systems, but it was not always going to be that way. The history of the P800 goes back to Ericsson's decision to become a part of the Symbian joint venture in 1999. Ulf Wretling, Director, Developer Program commented that "when Ericsson originally engaged with Symbian 4 years ago we did so after looking at a number of possible operating systems for our future smartphones. Our choice was based on the power of the operating system, which certainly allows us to do things that can not be achieved with some of the alternatives we looked at. Also its very efficient in it use of power and memory, for example we have 400 hours standby time on the P800. And from a business perspective the licensing model was very attractive.”

The initial work on developing a Symbian based smartphone was undertaken using the predecessor of UIQ, the Quartz Device Family Reference Design. This work resulted in a prototype phone that was exhibited at Cebit 2000.



The reason this prototype never came to market Ulf explained was because “we conducted extensive usability studies in Europe, Asia and America and got feedback from Users, Operators and Developers. This feedback told us that the prototype was not right. We had also learnt several lessons from R380, our earlier smartphone based on Symbian that was a closed implementation meaning that third party applications could not be run on the phone. So the feedback from the prototype and R380 lead us to the P800. Its smaller and more phone like, has higher performance and better features such as GPRS delivered using the latest generation Symbian OS, Version 7."

Changing the physical dimensions of the device from a wide PDA format to a more familiar phone size meant that the original Quartz interface had to be reworked. The target was to get a screen with a width of 4cm, compared to Quartz’s original 6cm width. This was achieved by reducing the pixel width from 240 to 208 as well as changing the dot pitch from 0.24 to 0.19. While these changes may not sound significant it meant going back to review the entire presentation, fonts, icons and layout, to ensure that the usability of Quartz was retained in the new format. (It is interesting to note that UIQ also retains the 240 pixel width screen as an option. Sanyo have been exhibiting a Communicator based on this format for a number of years but sadly have not yet brought it to market.)

The changes to Quartz were commenced in January 2001. When Sony Ericsson was formed in October 2001 the P800 project was well underway and the first public announcement of the phone was made at Cebit 2002. In June the addition of a Sony Memory Stick Duo slot and MP3 player were announced. In addition to the phone hardware Sony Ericsson also developed a “phone” interface. The P800 uses a clever flip keyboard which covers just fractionally more than half of the screen, the smart feature is that the keys actually press onto the touch sensitive screen, providing the same keyboard layout whether the phone flip is present or has been removed. As the flip (or indeed on screen keyboard) obscures the lower half of the screen the standard UIQ interface is replaced with one that, using the jog dial, allows single handed access to the main phone and PIM applications.

I have had the opportunity to take a look at a pre-commercial P800 and can confirm that it is an impressive package. Fractionally larger than Nokia’s 7650, but significantly smaller than PDA phone offerings such as the Microsoft based XDA, it fits comfortably in the palm of the hand with the jog-dial, camera and web browser access buttons easily accessible. The touch screen occupies most of the phone front and is clear and crisp.



The features of the P800 include:
  • unified messaging for SMS, MMS, area information, auto set-up and emails (although the fax capability of the UIQ reference implementation has been omitted)
  • built in camera with image gallery,
  • voice dialing,
  • web browser,
  • audio player supporting WAV, MP3 and MIDI,
  • Video Player and Video Streaming,
  • PIM functions with diary, contacts list, task list, jotter (with support for both text and sketched notes), voice memo records and calculator
  • document viewer, with comprehensive format support
  • SyncML client, and
  • several games.

While all of these features are worthy of an in-depth description and review a couple are perhaps good examples of the power and usability of the P800. Voice Dialing is now a required feature of any self-respecting mobile phone. On the P800 calls can be initiated entirely by voice. You can record “magic” words for calling, answering and rejecting calls. You then simply speak the magic word and are then prompted for the contacts voice tag.

The camera is also interesting because of the control it offers. It provides control of brightness, contrast, a switch to deal with back-lit subjects, white balance for various shooting environments and control of image size and quality. In addition there is a “flicker free” feature which compensates for the flicker of fluorescent lights or TV and monitor screens. While I don’t see a huge requirement for taking pictures of a TV screen this feature is an illustration of how far Sony Ericsson have gone to provide a rich usable platform.

Perhaps one of the key feature of the P800, as with all the latest Symbian based phones, is the ability to load third party applications. At the time of writing only a limited number of applications have been publicized although several of the well known Symbian software houses have released or are advertising applications as being under development. It will be interesting to see what new applications emerge as a result of the Application Proclamation, which should be announced shortly, particularly given that much of Sony Ericsson’s strategy has focused on getting existing Microsoft and Palm developers working with the P800.

The arrival of the P800 is possibly a pivotal event in the development of the convergent PDA/smartphone in that it will be a benchmark in determining whether consumers prefer a phone with PDA capabilities or a PDA with phone capabilities. Having used the P800 I know what my preference is and blue is such a nice color!

You will hear a little more about the P800 in a few weeks when I take a look at Metrowerks CodeWarrior V2.0 and the on-device debugging capability.

About the WDN Symbian Editor, Richard Bloor:
Richard Bloor has 16 years experience in the IT industry. His earlier work was largely in design and development of commercial and manufacturing systems but more recently has focused on development and test management of government systems.

Richard Bloor is the Mobile Applications champion at System Architecture consultancy Equinox of Wellington, New Zealand.

Richard can be reached at rbloor@wirelessdevnet.com.

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